Shoutbox
General Information A shoutbox, saybox, tagboard, or chatterbox is a chat-like feature of some websites that allows people to quickly leave messages on the website, generally without any form of user registration. In their simplest form, shoutboxes are simply lists of short messages, possibly with information about their authors. The page may be automatically refreshed after a certain interval, or polled dynamically in order to keep new messages visible. Older posts are often deleted after a certain number of messages have been written in order to preserve space on the server. Technology Shoutboxes are embedded into a page with inline frames or JavaScript. Many Internet forum and weblog software packages can be modified to add shoutboxes in sidebars on site pages. Shoutboxes are usually maintained in a manner similar to that of more complex boards, with moderators that can delete posts and ban usernames or IP addresses. Occasionally, features such as impostor identification, flood control, and profanity filters may be included. Like most dynamic content, shoutboxes typically interface with a database, and some may query the database every time a page is requested. Additionally, a shoutbox may be loaded from a simple file. Unlike most dynamic content, however, shoutboxes are generally placed on every page of a web site, so they tend to cause disproportionate strain on databases. Therefore, care must be taken to ensure that shoutboxes do not use too many database resources. Caching systems like memcached can be used to mitigate this to some extent, or an alternative implementation such as storing all messages in system-wide shared memory rather than a database may be used. Chaos Order's Shoutmix The Shoutbox seen at the bottom of the page of the website is currently under the ownership of Koolwhipp. The previous owner was Benj. It was preceeded by Gabbly. Omori's Shoutmix Koolwhipp owned the first and third shoutboxes on the site. The first went up to 40 pages, had most of the site's administrators as such, and featured most of the standard emoticons. It was ended because his funds ran dry and he could not continue to support it. His second one was added because of Benj's subsequent leaving and stopping the funding for the Shoutbox. It features 50 pages, some of the standard and some of Benj's emoticons, but the main thing was that there were absolutely no administrators aside from Koolwhipp. This meant that he could censor anything he wanted, which had some of the users on edge. He doesn't actually do anything other than that, so it is primarily an anarchy. Benj's Shoutmix Benj owned the second shoutbox on the site. It went up to a whopping 125 pages, had every emoticon supplied and some not, and had a developed system for choosing who got administrator privileges. However, near the end of Benj's time, some of the more assholish users lashed out at him for no reason on a daily basis. This is the reason that Benj hates most of the users, and will likely never come back. Category:Terms Category:Shoutbox